he following appeared as an editorial in the student newspaper of Groveton College.

"To combat the recently reported dramatic rise in cheating among college and university students, these institutions should adopt honor codes similar to Groveton's, which calls for students to agree not to cheat in their academic endeavors and to notify a faculty member if they suspect that others have cheated. Groveton's honor code replaced an old-fashioned system in which students were closely monitored by teachers and an average of thirty cases of cheating per year were reported. The honor code has proven far more successful: in the first year it was in place, students reported twenty-one cases of cheating; five years later, this figure had dropped to fourteen. Moreover, in a recent survey conducted by the Groveton honor council, a majority of students said that they would be less likely to cheat with an honor code in place than without."


In this editorial, the author states that by adopting "honor codes" similar to Groveton College(GC)'s, those institutions will gain an advantage in the combat against the recently reported dramatic rise in cheating among college and university students. To make his recommendation seems more concrete, he cites a comparison of cheating rate among students in GC before and after adopting this approach and also a survey "conducted by the Groveton honor council" indicating that a majority of students believe this that approach really work. It is tempting to believe the author in light of so many facts he provided. However, a careful examination of this argument reveals that this argument suffers from a series of fallacies, which renders it unconvincing as it stands.

To begin with, by citing this comparison, it is obviously that the author(or the author hopes the reader) takes for granted the following assumption: The decrease in number of cheating cases reported is due to the honor codes. But the author fails to account a number of alternative explanations. The college might underwent a lot of changes over the course of five years. For instance, the admission standard might be enhanced and the new students, due to their relatively good record before, would volunteerly reject to cheat academically. Moreover, fewer cases reported does not necessarily lead to fewer cases occured. The reporting procedure might become ineffective during these years. Without considering and excluding these possible scenarios, the author cannot convince me of his reasoning.

Another problem with this argument is the cited survey. The argument provides no assurances to the reliability of the survey. In other words, can the respondents represented all the students in Groveton College? How many students participated in this survey? Without providing detailed information concerning the above questions, it might well be that the students who never cheated in exam were more inclined to response to the survey, or perhaps only 1 percent of the students in GC participated in this survey. Any of the events, if true, would serve to undermine the validity of this survey.

Even assuming that the author can substantiate all the foregoing assumptions, he cannot conclude the same approach would work for other institutions. In order to substantiate this, he should provide clues to show that all these institutions are comparable or similar in every aspects. Otherwise, he just cannot make his recommendation convincible.

In sum, I have no doubt that the author is in his/her best intention to help reduce the cheating rate in those institutions by proposing this "honor codes" approach, but unfortuantely, I have to say, his evidence has failed this intention.